Since 2015, far right parties drawing heavily on radical anti-refugee rhetoric gained electoral support in Germany while the number of political hate crimes targeting refugees rose. Both phenomena – far right electoral support and prevalence of right-wing hate crimes – have theoretically and empirically been linked with socio-structural and contextual variables. However, systematic empirical research on these links is scattered and scarce at best. We combine official statistics on political hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support of the far right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) in the German national elections 2017 with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) and survey data collected in a representative survey (N = 1,506) in 2016. We aggregate and combine data for all German municipalities except Berlin which were the level of analysis for the current study. In path analyses, we find socio-structural variables to be unrelated with each other but significantly correlated with both criterion variables in a systematic fashion: proportion of foreigners was negatively while unemployment rate was positively linked with far right electoral support. Right-wing crime was linked positively with unemployment rate across Germany and positively with proportion of foreigners only in East Germany while proportion of foreigners was unrelated to right-wing crime in West Germany. When including survey measures into the model, they were linked with socio-structural variables in the predicted fashion – intergroup contact correlated positively with proportion of foreigners, collective deprivation correlated positively with unemployment rates, and both predicted extreme right-wing attitudes. However, their contribution to the explained variance in outcome variables above and beyond socio-structural variables was neglectable. We argue that both far right-wing electoral support and right-wing hate crime can be conceptualized as behavioral forms of political extremism shaped through socio-structural and contextual factors and discuss implications for preventing political extremism.

Social infrastructure is made up of various material as well as non-material goods, ranging from venues for leisure such as movie theaters to indispensable everyday commodities, like sidewalks and streets. This is true both for urban and rural areas. However, the increasing emergence of digital aspects of social infrastructure has seemed to go unnoticed to some extent, with research specifically focusing on these digital aspects of social infrastructure being scarce at best—even though digitalization is currently a major emerging meta-development worldwide. The goal of our contribution is therefore to investigate the digital sphere and integrate it into the concept of social infrastructure. Drawing on descriptive findings from a multi-sited, community-based survey of residents in four rural areas in Germany (N = 413) as well as from 40 qualitative interviews, we present an integrative and expanded conceptualization of what we term a tangible <em>digital social infrastructure</em>. To do so, we examine digital neighborly connectedness as a social resource during the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study. We argue that digital neighborly connectedness served as both an integral part of on-site social infrastructure and as a social resource, especially during pandemic times. We discuss our results in light of current research on social infrastructure, with a specific focus on the scope of what counts as social infrastructure, as well as current discourse on social infrastructure in rural areas.

Der Beitrag diskutiert Effekte digitaler nachbarschaftlicher Kommunikation auf das lokale Zusammenleben im ländlichen Raum. Dazu werden Daten aus einer Befragung sowie leitfadengestützte Interviews mit Einwohnerinnen und Einwohner in Metelen im Kreis Steinfurt ausgewertet. Die Befragungsergebnisse zeigen, dass die Nutzung digitaler Nachbarschaftsnetzwerke in einer ländlichen Gemeinde zu intensiveren Kontakten in der Nachbarschaft sowie einem verstärkten Gefühl gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe führen. Allerdings begünstigt dieser digitale Nachbarschaftskontakt keine analogen materiellen Austauschbeziehungen, wie das Leihen von Gegenständen. Weiterhin weist die Auswertung der leitfadengestützten Interviews darauf hin, dass digitale Nachbarschaftskommunikation der Organisation des Vereinslebens dient und die lokalen Aktivitäten einem größeren Publikum präsentiert. Zudem werden digitale Netzwerke vor allem zur Information genutzt, sie erleichtern die Organisation des nachbarschaftlichen Brauchtums. Daraus folgt, dass digitale Nachbarschaftsnetzwerke bei der Ausgestaltung der Zukunft der Daseinsvorsorge mit zu berücksichtigen sind, ihre Nutzung aber voraussetzungsvoll ist. Denn digitaler Kontakt entsteht aus analogem Kontakt, wofür es Anlässe und Infrastrukturen braucht.

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